Ava Labs, the developer of Avalanche, the high throughput platform for deploying decentralized applications (dapps) and custom chains, has issued Firewood, an update that the team says is a “multi-year effort that” when eventually rolled out, will make blockchain data storage more efficient. Specifically, Ava Labs said Firewood solves a major concern for expanding blockchains: data management.
Ava Labs releases firewood to the public
Ava Labs is open sourcing the code for Firewood for refinement before final deployment. Ultimately, the team wants Firewood to become a decision tool that better organizes and stores blockchain data more efficiently. Toward this mission, Ava Labs developers are taking a new approach to storing and managing data, unlike legacy networks.
Blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin use the Merkle Tree structure to organize data. Although the system has been widely replicated in emerging ledgers, the Merkle Tree architecture tends to be slow and inefficient as the blockchain grows.
By identifying the flaws in the Merkle Tree system, Ava Labs is building Firewood from scratch, but with some “improvements” to the system. Their goal, the statement reads, is to make the storage and organization of blockchain data smoother.
Firewood is not dependent on generic tools such as LevelDB or RocksDB. Ava Labs claims that these tools have been a cause of “misalignment,” leading to “significant overhead of disk I/O, size (failure to track if state is still in use), and serialization/deserialization of Tree data structures to support high-throughput blockchain. workload.”
In light of these inefficiencies, the goal is to make firewood a replacement “for the LevelDB/RocksDB + Merkle Tree.” Ava Labs claims that Firewood can help users organize their data storage “more efficiently” with their system. This improvement enables high-throughput storage without constant data scrubbing or compression.
In the coming days, Ava Labs revealed that firewood will be integrated into several parts of the Avalanche. At the same time, the team plans to release “a series of reproducible benchmarks comparing Firewood’s performance against other blockchain databases.”
Will Avalanche Rise to $20 and the 2023 High?
The release of Firewood comes as AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, has been under immense pressure in 2023. The decline, fueled by the bear market and recent comments from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claiming that AVAX is an unregistered security, put more pressure on the coin.
AVAX is changing hands at $9.53, up 11% from the September 2023 low. However, the coin is down about 60% from the 2023 high around $20.
Feature image from Canva, chart from TradingView
